HD 4890 in April?

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legcramp

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http://vr-zone.com/articles/amd-to-launch-radeon-hd-4890-rv790-in-april/6578.html?doc=6578

Thanks to Thilan29 @ anandtech


"AMD is slated to launch the Radeon HD 4890 card based on the RV790 core in April not the rumored Radeon HD 4970. The RV790XT A11 sample is running at 850Mhz core at 1.3V and 975Mhz GDDR5 memory. In comparision, a Radeon HD 4870 (RV770) card runs at 750MHz core and 900MHz GDDR5 memory. AMD told their partners that RV790 is expected to be around 20% faster than the current Radeon HD 4870 RV770 card and will compete headon against the GeForce 285 GTX card. The pricing? Between US$199 to US$249."


Hmmm pricing looks good if true, although this is probably just an overclocked HD4870 with a bump in voltage.
 
reasonable price considering you can get a 1GB 4870 for $200 now and this is supposed to be available two months from now
 
Thanks for the heads up, any news on HD 4890x2 then?

/Need to sell my GTX 280 quick, before it completely depreciates.
 
I wish I had waited like 3 weeks so I could have gotten a 1GB card. Oh well. I think I will wait this one out. I get decent enough performance in the games I play now. I think the next time I do an major build or upgrade will be when Windows 7 goes retail.
 
Well, Well, Well... what do we have here...Right before my birthday :D. Somebody's going to be very happy. If they put out that card at that price, it's going to be a killer.
 
I assume this is more than a simple core speed bump, since 850MHz is only a 13% improvement, and the memory clocks are little more than 8% higher :confused:
 
John Vuong said:
I wonder if this card will beat the 285 GTX, thats what I'm curious about.
Click to expand...

depends on what you mean by beat. will it be faster and allow higher AI then the GTX285 probably not. bang for buck it should kill it. At 20% it puts it on par with a GTX280, for a hundred less then the GTX285. so maybe 2/3 the cost and 90% of the performance of GTX285
 
I wonder how much head room this is going to have for overclocking. :D

Maybe this is the reason why AMD decided not to officially launch the HD4850x2.
 
rincewind said:
I assume this is more than a simple core speed bump, since 850MHz is only a 13% improvement, and the memory clocks are little more than 8% higher :confused:
Click to expand...

Maybe they are also enabling some of those redundant shader units like some people suspected...hmmm 960/800 = 1.20.

Whatever the case I'm waiting for the high end 40nm cards to even consider an upgrade. There were rumors that TSMC is having some issues with the 40nm process and current leakage, maybe that's why AMD is being forced to fill the gap with this card instead of just launching a new high end 40nm in the summer. I hope both camps continue the focus on the $150-300 sweet spot in the next product lines.
 
Silent.Sin said:
Maybe they are also enabling some of those redundant shader units like some people suspected...hmmm 960/800 = 1.20.

Whatever the case I'm waiting for the high end 40nm cards to even consider an upgrade. There were rumors that TSMC is having some issues with the 40nm process and current leakage, maybe that's why AMD is being forced to fill the gap with this card instead of just launching a new high end 40nm in the summer. I hope both camps continue the focus on the $150-300 sweet spot in the next product lines.
Click to expand...

interesting, in theory the clock plus memory bump could account for the claim of 20% but his seems likely, if yield are up far enough they could simply enable (or not disable) the extra shaders. in some games like crysis / clear sky that would provide a hell of an advantage, maybe that is why they are hoping to use this to combat the GTX285
 
ATi said there was really no performance advantage with R7xx generation hardware and that it would be enabled in future hardware.
 
Valset said:
interesting, in theory the clock plus memory bump could account for the claim of 20%
Click to expand...

No, they are not additive - a 20% increase to both is required (although in many cases the memory bandwidth will already be sufficient and won't need increasing at all).
 
rincewind said:
No, they are not additive - a 20% increase to both is required (although in many cases the memory bandwidth will already be sufficient and won't need increasing at all).
Click to expand...

you missed the part about "claim"
 
matrix563 said:
sideport would be nice if enabled for my 4807x2 i am getting on monday :)
Click to expand...

could you just be aware that you double posted within 2 minutes, and try to edit your previous post if you have another comment to make? Thank you kindly.

-Andrew
M0d3r@t0r of my own house
 
Silent.Sin said:
Maybe they are also enabling some of those redundant shader units like some people suspected...hmmm 960/800 = 1.20.
Click to expand...

AMD's redundancy doesn't work like that. It's like a spare tire. If one goes bad you can replace it but you can't use the spare to upgrade your cars to 5 tires.
 
Hopefully these come with 1GB of VRAM...otherwise $199-249 would become $299 for 1GB and with this generation of cards, 1GB def has advantages.
 
cool, interesting ot see what happens with these. i'm surprised ati doesn't just wait for nvidia to release their next gens and then come out with a faster card.
 
Hot does not equal bad. Take women for example!

On a more serious note. I'm excited about these, as I've been waiting to replace my 512mb 4870 for a while.
 
This seems to be pretty much confirmed by this point, see this and this.

Too bad 4870x2 and 4870 price drops so far are not steep enough to warrant any conclusions. But once 4870 1Gb hit $200 mark no MIRs you know something is up ;)
 
DeadSkull said:
This seems to be pretty much confirmed by this point, see this and this.

Too bad 4870x2 and 4870 price drops so far are not steep enough to warrant any conclusions. But once 4870 1Gb hit $200 mark no MIRs you know something is up ;)
Click to expand...

They're getting there. The Sapphire 48701GB is like $220 w/o mir and $205 or so w/ mir.
 
I'm more curious as to how Nvidia will respond. It's competing with their top card, the difference is the ATI option looks to be way cheaper. Perhaps Nvidia will lower their prices?
 
Jon55 said:
I'm more curious as to how Nvidia will respond. It's competing with their top card, the difference is the ATI option looks to be way cheaper. Perhaps Nvidia will lower their prices?
Click to expand...

Just like the GTX260/GTX280 vs. 4870 all over again.
 
Jon55 said:
I'm really glad ATI is back in the game again. If they could improve their driver stability there would be no question as to the better purchase choice (ATI).
Click to expand...

I'd go out on a limb and say most driver problem threads you see here are purely as a result of user error one way or another. Either people don't know how to uninstall drivers when switching from ati to nvidia or vice versa or people are just installing drivers on unstable overclocked systems.
 
Does a mediocre clock bump really put it into GTX280-285 levels??? I hope their claim is true because at $199-$249 that sounds REALLY good.

I was planning to wait out till the 40nm cards in summer but this sounds pretty tempting...
I hope this is the same size as 4870. nVidia cards are out of question for me because my case can't fit them.
 
It will have been nearly a year since the GTX 280 released, so yeah I would say it's about time for that kind of performance to be down to the $199+ range.

Just like when the 8800GTX launched, and then the 8800GT a year later for $199.
 
TheBlueChanell said:
Maybe this is the reason why AMD decided not to officially launch the HD4850x2.
Click to expand...

No. We already know that desire to push the 4870 X2 to counter the GTX280 was the reason why ATi didn't work on a reference 4850 X2 board. Now that the 4870 X2 vs GTX280 is old news, ATi is turning attention to and pressuring their partners to release 4850 X2 boards to keep a firm lock on the bang the buck segment.

The 4890 sounds like it'll replace the stock 4870.
 
snowysnowcones said:
I wonder if there's a die-shrink involved with this new card.
Click to expand...

It's almost certain that's not the case. The next shrink due up at the plate is 40nm. Going from 55->40nm would reduce the R770 pretty significantly. So much so it actually becomes hard to package it if it were to remain as is spec wise. It's hard to fit all those wire traces to the VRAM from such a small die, something that is referred to as being "pad limited". They actually must add core logic or some other circuitry to fill out the die (cache works really well for this purpose on CPUs), otherwise it becomes a lot harder to make the necessary connections with a 256-bit memory bus and other I/O stuff. There is a good, and pretty technical discussion about this at beyond3d if you want to check out their forums.

Instead of die-shrinks, I think there's a better possibility of some die tweaking. They might have ditched the side-port and filled that space in with some extra shading units, or they could have just added the units they already have there for redundancy to the pipeline. This would require some tweaks to the thread scheduler on the R770 die and isn't insignificant, but they've had 6 months now to work that out so I think it's a pretty reasonable theory.

AMD knew that NVidia would be forced to counter its 55nm GPUs and would eventually be moving to 55nm itself. I have a feeling they may have planned this ace up their sleeve all along but didn't really have space for it in their product/pricing hierarchy until the 4870 reached the level it's at now. Now they can go ahead and retarget that $300 price point - one that was left open by not officially launching the 4850X2. The R770 die has the capacity for 160 more shading units than it is already using, but they are used for redundancy. The space is there, just a matter of using it.

Of course this could just be a re-spun die that can take higher clocks/voltage with some better RAM and that 20% increase number in the article is way off-base, but that's just not as fun to speculate on :p.
 
ihira said:
Does a mediocre clock bump really put it into GTX280-285 levels??? I hope their claim is true because at $199-$249 that sounds REALLY good.

I was planning to wait out till the 40nm cards in summer but this sounds pretty tempting...
I hope this is the same size as 4870. nVidia cards are out of question for me because my case can't fit them.
Click to expand...

its doubtful that the clock speed alone would do that. but like posted above there are still several tricks that they can do to increase the performance. One of the simpler ones is not to disable the redundant shaders and such. that would the 20% there. and this makes sense as it would not affect their yields (you would be left with 4870 and 4830 chips if needed) and allows for a nice boost to the top of the line. it would take some work but this is a new stepping (or revision, whatever you want to call it.)and you could just pretty much drop the new GPU in the existing cards. 4890X2 sounds pretty good.
 
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